The 16 essays in "Writing Off the Hyphen" technique the literature of the Puerto Rican diaspora from present theoretical positions, with provocative and insightful effects. The authors examine how the diasporic event of Puerto Ricans is performed out within the context of sophistication, race, gender, and sexuality and the way different issues rising from post-colonialism and post-modernism come into play.

Supplying a severe account of the cave in of the FTAA negotiations and adjustments to strength kin within the Americas, this booklet argues that the cave in was once rooted in a "crisis of authority" caused by way of turning out to be competition within the Americas to US management and the neo-liberal reforms that were promoted through Washington because the Eighties.

This can be an illuminating dialogue of guilt, worry, violence and aesthetics from an international point of view. Herlinghaus evaluates new Latin American novels, motion pictures and track during the lens of a few of Walter Benjamin's arguable writings on violence and faith.

Extra info for A Poetics of Relation: Caribbean Women Writing at the Millennium

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In contemporary female narratives from predominantly rural areas, as was the Francophone region as a whole well up to the 1980s, images of liberated women are still relatively rare. Condé’s protagonists, who are for the most part urban or diasporic, constitute a notable exception.

De la Grifa negra,” for example, the mixed-raced woman no longer connotes sensuality but is invoked to recall a past of exploitation and slavery. In this respect, Burgos’s verse contrasts with that of her counterpart Luis Palés Matos, for instance “Mulata Antilla,” which reappraises 24 O A Poetics of Relation the African legacy of Puerto Rico but nonetheless perpetuates the trope of the over sexualized mulatto female. ” (El cuerpo correcto, 1998). Here the eponymous character is endowed with charms that prove to be so potent that they perdure long after her death.

In the sequel to the novel ¡Yo! (1997), Yolanda’s cousin Lucinda is sent to the United States at sixteen lest she should “go behind the palm trees and ruin her chances of a good marriage” by staying in the Dominican Republic (¡Yo! 38–39). S. high school romance, Lucinda is immediately summoned back home. This control of female sexuality reaches the extreme when middle-aged Yolanda, twice married and divorced, cannot disclose her relationship with her partner to her island relatives because “down there women don’t have lovers out in the open” ( ¡Yo!